By Myron Love
When first opened for play in 1917, the Elmhurst Golf and Country Club, located just northeast of Winnipeg, was a model of what a golf course should be. Ninety-five years later, the golf course management is embarked on a program that aims to recapture Elmhurst’s original look as it rebuilds for the future.
“Our course was designed by Donald Ross,” Elmhurst superintendent Dan Ciekiewicz told a gathering of his fellow golf course superintendents during a presentation at the 2011 Manitoba Golf and Turf Conference in Winnipeg, Nov. 16-18. “Ross was one of the leading North American golf course architects of his time. His designs reflected the courses in Scotland with their open landscapes.”
Over the 10 decades, though, he noted, many of the original design elements have been lost. The squarish putting greens, for example, have become rounded and have shrunk in size. As well, accumulations of topdressings have made the inner portions of the greens higher than the periphery. The fairways have been significantly narrowed over time. Crossing bunkers have been lost. (Ross’ original plan called for more crossing bunkers, Ciekiewicz said). And too many trees have been planted.
“Ross preferred a minimal number of trees,” Ciekiewicz said. “We want trees, but not too many. What we really want is amazing vistas through the golf course.”
Ciekiewicz has been employed at Elmhurst for more than 20 years. His appointment as superintendent seven years ago coincided with the decision to begin restoring parts of the course.
“There are so many new courses and a real competition to attract golfers now,” Ciekiewicz said. “At Elmhurst, we were looking for a way to stand out and make some noise. We decided to go back to our origins. We began our transformation three years ago. It has been an exciting time.”
The first challenge, he told his audience, was to hire the right architect. In the case of Elmhurst, that was Ron Prichard, the author of dozens of golf course restorations throughout North America.
“Fortunately, Ron and I are on the same page,” Ciekiewicz said. “We are both interested in sustainability and the old ways of doing things. Ron tries to recapture the traditional spirit of the golf game and the natural beauty of the course. Why fight nature when you can work with it?”
The next stage was to dig into the past and find out what the original course looked like.
“Ron found a copy of the original plans and also looked at aerial shots from the late 1920s,” Ciekiewicz noted. “A lot of the original design structure is still on the course waited to be teased out.”
It is very important to consult the membership and get them on board, Ciekiewicz said.
“We formed a golf course restoration committee, created various planning and promotional documents and spreadsheets and held information sessions for our members. We identified the high impact holes that we would start with, and changed one of our worst holes into one of our best.”
In a contractor, Ciekiewicz and his board were looking for someone with public relations skills and artistic flair who would work through all weather conditions.
“We also wanted someone with a good work ethic who had a genuine interest in the project.”
Ciekiewicz and his board hired contractor Dan Philcox to do the restoration work.
In tackling the bunkers to be restored, Ciekiewicz noted, the contractor overexcavated the bunker floors and lined them first with three to five inches of clay. The contractor also lined the sand and turf interface with burlap bags filled with soil similar to the natural soil around the site.
“The bags create a really firm and stable edge,” Ciekiewicz reported. “And they are more pliable then stakes or wood stripping. To secure the bags in place, we bought chopsticks, two to a bag. That security idea was stumbled upon one day while the contractor and Ciekiewicz were out having sushi.”
The plans also called for drains in the bunker floor to drain water to the outside and the planting of dwarf bluegrass on greenside bunker faces and fescues on fairway bunker faces.
“We incorporated primed fescue seed in a synthetic erosion control product that we installed,” Ciekiewicz said. “The biggest thing is not to overfertilize—you want poverty soil. The seeding rate should be about half a pound per 1,000 square feet. Less is more.”
To square the tee blocks the way they were originally designed, Ciekiewicz and his crew returned to hand mowing. Greenside bunker faces are now maintained with nylon string trimmers followed by blowers to clean up the clipping debris. Fescue on fairway bunker faces is left to grow naturally through the course of the season. Restored bunkers are now hand-raked only in order to maintain their integrity through time.
While these steps are more labour-intensive, Ciekiewicz noted, he and his team have less maintenance to do around trees and in the roughs which they are leaving to nature in select areas.
“We had to make some adjustments to our automatic irrigation system so that water is not going into the rough areas,” he said.
Ciekiewicz and his staff also created their own core aeration sod nursery to generate putting green sod that would best complement existing turf. Aeration cores (5/8 of an inch) are installed atop a complementary rootzone mix through a belt-drive topdresser, bentgrass seed is incorporated and topdressing sand is applied.
“We don’t overwater,” he said. “We make more sod than we require. Our goal is to create more pinnable areas on our old school greens and introduce more strategy into the golf game. In some cases, we have restored green shapes by adding 40 per cent to their evolved size.”
Since the beginning of the project in 2009, Ciekiewicz reported, Elmhurst has invested about $250,000 in restoring five holes.
“We have built 19 new bunkers thus far, expanded four greens, created one greenside turfed hollow and cut over 800 trees” he said. “This is a long-term project with the time frame depending on how much funding we have from year to year to continue the work.”
For other golf course superintendents considering restoration projects, Ciekiewicz recommends getting the work done as soon as possible (because, he noted, planning committee membership changes over time), getting the best contractor available, developing an ongoing relationship with said contractor and taking lots of photographs before and after the restoration process is complete.
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